Carolyn Marr named Citizen of the Year

After Carolyn Marr and her husband, Terry, moved to Adrian about eight years ago, it wasn’t long before she knew she needed to get involved in community service.

One of her ways of doing that was to join Civitan of Lenawee, where she eventually became its treasurer and took on the tasks of helping run the annual Christmas tree sale, co-chair Adrian’s Fourth of July Parade and coordinate the service organization’s float in the city’s Winterfest parade.

All these activities and more have earned Marr this year’s Citizen of the Year honor from The Daily Telegram.

Marr was nominated by fellow Civitan member Dorothy Schmidt, who co-chairs the July 4 parade with her.

“Carolyn has a tremendous warmth,” said Schmidt. “And she’s very supportive of the community and she’s just a great person.”

To Schmidt, nominating Marr for the honor was a natural thing to do.

“There isn’t anything in the community that she doesn’t work well with,” she said.

In her email making the nomination, she wrote: “Carolyn’s greatest character quality is teamwork. She is easy to work with, is a great listener when there are problems, and finds unique ways to get the work done when she is involved in an activity. … If there is something that needs to be accomplished, I don’t hesitate to call Carolyn.”

Civitan president Sue Stange agreed that Marr is one of those people who can always be counted on to step in whenever she’s needed.

“If a project does not have a chair, we can always look at Carolyn and without hesitation she takes it on,” Stange said.

Stange said that Marr does not take her work as Civitan’s treasurer lightly and that the job takes several hours a week. “And the kicker is, it is all volunteer,” she said.

“As (Civitan’s) president, whenever I contact her to ask a question about our finances she is always, and I mean always, on the spot with her answer and I can trust whatever she tells me. Carolyn is an asset to Civitan of Lenawee!”

Helping make the city in which she lives a better place came naturally to both Marr and her husband, who is also a Civitan member and co-chairs the service organization’s annual Christmas tree sale with her. When they came to Adrian, “we wanted to get involved in community things,” she said, and when they found out about Civitan from one of its members, Pat Husband, “that was that.”

A Canadian by birth, Marr moved to the United States when she was 22. She and Terry have been married for almost 30 years.

Carolyn and Terry have two children each, plus six grandchildren and a great-grandchild. It was their desire to live closer to the family that brought them to Adrian from where they had spent the 12 previous years: on a sailboat touring far-flung parts of the world.

The couple had been living near Detroit, in Pleasant Ridge, when they decided to embark on their sailing adventure. The idea, in fact, was one of the things they learned they had in common when they first met.

“Terry had been thinking about doing the sail for years,” Marr said, and she had long dreamed of going on a freighter voyage.

And finally they decided it was time to make the dream a reality. Terry retired from what was then called the Michigan Employment Security Commission, she quit her job as an accountant, and off they went with their cat — who proved to be perfectly suited for life on a sailboat — to be “vagabonds,” as Marr put it.

“We decided it’d be a great life, and it was,” she said.

The Marrs’ 12-year odyssey took them everywhere from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe. Finally, they sold their sailboat in the Netherlands and flew home.

With three of their children living in the Detroit area and Marr’s mother in Windsor, Ontario, the couple started looking for a place to settle down where they could be fairly close to all of them.

“We started looking at small towns, and we picked Adrian,” she said.

They started becoming part of the city’s fabric right away.

One of the first things Marr did was join the Adrian Garden Club, both to nurture her personal interest in gardening and to help boost the activity as a way of beautifying the community. In the summertime, she helps find the club’s “garden of the month” by taking suggestions from others and scouting out people’s gardens for herself while she’s driving around, riding her bike or walking.

“I believe in really beautifying the city through gardening,” she said. “It’s a good, uplifting thing for the city.”

She became Civitan’s treasurer about five years ago and took on the July 4 parade work last year. That task certainly posed its share of challenges.

“It was hard because it was my first year,” she said. “I learned a lot.”

Among her many other activities are being in a book club and, with her husband, becoming a regular patron and supporter of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra and the Croswell Opera House.

“I think this city has a lot to offer,” she said. “There’s just a lot of things going on here all the time.”

The couple share their home with Charlotte, their almost 10-year-old golden retriever, and two cats, a shelter rescue named Georgia and Stella, who just showed up in their yard one day.

And, said Marr, she and Terry definitely enjoy their home, their adopted hometown and the people they have gotten to know over their years here.

“We’ve made a lot of good friends here,” she said.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.